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[Seraphim342]

So, I have successfully used a modification of the Dwarven Auto Shotgun that uses water as ammo, which I call the Dwarven Super Soaker, to kill elves in the past.  As we all know, water cannons are extremely effective against hippies of all types.  How it works is, the minecarts pick up water from a cistern and shoot it out at invaders, which knocks them down into a looong killing pit where they turn into a wonderful shower of gibs.  Very entertaining.

What I'm wondering is if contaminants in the water remain when transported via minecart.  I would love to be ale to afflict sieges with eye-rot this way, but I no longer have the save with the Super Soaker to test this right away.  Would this work?  Can think of a basically limited number or possibilities for inflicting misery upon elves with this system.  Has anyone tried this? 

Seems win-win either way, because if it doesn't it could further our advances in Dwarven water purification/desalinization and remove pumps from the equation.  Still, a Dwarven Railgun firing carts loaded with blood boiling extract across the map would be wonderful.  The gobbos, elves, and humans of the world will be no match for chemical warfare, and it would give us something useful to do with the contaminants we collect from our airlocks. 

[Tally]

I seem to recall hearing that contaminants stay in water flung from minecarts.

That said, I am disappointed in your methods. The proper way to deal with elveshippiescreatures not worth mentioning is to fling wood at them. From a wooden minecart. And knock them into a pit full of wooden spears. Even better if they provided the spears themselves.

Edit: You could also toss them the messy remains of their fallen. Elves just eat up that kind of thing.

[Seraphim342]

While I can't say that flaying your enemies alive with thousands of flying xXSockXxs isn't awesome, I like the Dwarven Super Soaker/Flamethrower (Magma!!!) because it is much easier to automate and has much simpler ammo requirements.  All you need is a pool full of your favorite liquids than can be constantly refilled by a natural source. 

Got a nice cesspool of FB nastiness drained down from an airlock on one of my forts though, and I'm now going to weaponize the hell out of it.  If anything, a system that causes invaders' eyes to rot out while their bodies slowly liquify inside their armor is much more horrifying and cruel than any kind of projectile-based system, which usually kills invaders outright without giving them sufficient time to suffer and ponder the consequences of their life choices. 

[Drazinononda]

Don't forget that water flung from a minecart is still considered a flying blunt object, for damage purposes. It's less like splashing them with showers of water than it is like smashing them with boulders. Made of water.

Read up: Fully Automatic Watergun

[gchristopher]

I haven't tried contaminating mine with anything other than mud, and the evil biomes in that save are sadly lacking in syndrome weather. I have one that I'm working on at the moment*, so I can try contaminating the water and seeing if it somehow ends up on the targets.

I wonder:
- A contaminant stays as part of the water "boulder" in flight. I'm pretty sure that contaminant came from the square where the cart was filled.
- Does the contaminant survive impact? Since I'm flinging muddy water, it's hard to tell, once it mixes with all the goblin blood and vomit on impact.
- If the contaminant survives impact, does it come into contact with the target creature as part of the collision or does it move to the floor?
- If it's on the floor, then creatures with boots will mostly be safe. What about creatures body parts skidding along the floor? That happens a lot Do those come into contact with contaminants on the floor?

I can contribute a save, if no one has one handy. I need to do a little more cleanup first.

* status of the Waughtocannon

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Work in progress:
- Reworked the cannon to be a 5-barrel hybrid design, with 4 fully automatic water barrels and one manual barrel with a two-level rise so that it can fire containers full of items. Shredding repeatedly animated goblin corpses into the greatest number of pieces and then firing bins full of them is the current plan.
- Increasing the length of the acceleration run from 4 to 6 ramps definitely increased the range of the water globs in flight. A much higher percentage fly the entire 25 blocks of the target range and hit the back wall. How hard would it be to keep the ammo reliably contaminated?
- Reworked the range so the entry area contains no floor bars that building destroyers can target. The closest vulnerable building is now an artifact grate, so presumably they'll all target that and get pulverized.
- The start/stop mechanism is STILL buggy! It fires great on full-auto, but I desperately need a way to stop and then restart a row of minecarts in the magazine without them getting hung up on a corner. I might have to derail them all out into a holding track or something.

Things that work okay:
- Damage. It seems like water cannons can break plenty of bones in a goblin's body, but they can still manage to crawl away on their shattered limbs if given a path. Most armor also seems to protect against water cannons pretty well.
- Reliability. If I'm not trying to constantly stop and restart it, the carts stay on track and it doesn't flood itself or explode.
- Keeping dwarves out of the works. This could be more foolproof, and any accident can quickly pulverize a lot of dwarves.

Things that work great:
- Fully automatic fire rate. It got to the point where my source aquifer wasn't producing water fast enough and I had to dig out more aquifer. If it gets much faster, the pump stack might not supply water fast enough.
- Drainage. Having a multi-layer drainage system with bridges to optionally drop the goblinite into a safe collection area worked out nicely, and it still drains adequately even with fewer floor bars.
- Knockback! Only very large creatures can make any forward progress in the line of fire. One beautiful side-effect is that it will knock riders off their mounts, so a Jabberer might make it through, nicely separated from their rider and ready for caging and taming.

[QuantumMenace]

Guess what? IT WORKS. 

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

How a cold-blooded animal can get a fever is beyond me, but that's beside the point.

Anyway, this setup uses a forgotten beast with toxic secretions, meaning it should produce the contaminant constantly. The pump on the left moves water through diagonal fortifications to avoid the pressure-teleport effect that prevents flow. the water comes from an aquifer channel hidden by the axle. It picks up the toxin and flows out through a grate directly to the right of the FB, since flow can sometimes push creatures through fortifications but not grates. Currently a bug exists where a building destroyer may not attack a building directly next to it, which can be taken advantage of here if you're not fortunate enough to get an artifact grate. I'm not certain but catching sight of a creature might interrupt this behavior, so be careful.

The toxin ends up covering the tile with a roller on a ramp (selected in second picture). The pump there is just to power the roller without leaking.

Here's a side view schematic of the cart track:

# = fortification   W= stationary cart (the heavier, the better to prevent water backflow from pushing it)
L = exploit curve track ramp (the two directions of the track are against a wall and in the direction of acceleration)

  _  LLLLLL  W#
/   \_______

The ramp on the bottom left of the schematic is the one covered with poisoned water. The "hill" between this and the other trench does not have a track on the flat tile on top of it, to facilitate derailing.

The cart is pushed out of the water trench by the roller and will fly over the gap onto the curve track ramps where it picks up speed. It will miss the first few tiles of them due to being airborne. After it picks up enough speed to launch a glob, it strikes the stationary cart and falls into the gap. The rollers push it back up over the hill, where it becomes airborne, hits the rear wall, and falls back into the toxic water to pick up another load.

The water laced with forgotten beast extract [833] strikes a creature and falls through the floor, which consists of down stairs covered by bars. It doesn't appear to leave a coating of the substance but the effects are felt anyway. I'm not sure if having standing water in the room prevents infection or not. If you use this setup, use grates, not bars. Building destroyers immediately dismantle bars but have to wear grates down first.

This setup is only for the use of one cart, they will get jammed if you use more. Trying to use this with a flooded multiple-cart "magazine" could be tricky, since you need to get the toxin onto the tiles where the carts fill up.